BASIC at the makerspace

Hackerspace
#1

Spring is just around the corner and its that time again! Vintage Computers will be holding programming courses all Season long. After alot of interest in vintage BASIC programming has been expressed we have acquired a few of the original College books on the subject and will be presenting a few courses.

Courses to look forward to:

- Intermediate Game Design with RPG elements and Interactive Fiction
- Into to BASIC (focus on 8 Bit programming in BASIC/QBASIC)
- Graphical Programming
- TCP/IP Network Programming in 8 bit systems

Each Course will lead into the other and by the end of the series one should have a fully playable game ready for demo at the Summer Demoscene/LAN Party.

3 Likes
#2

How well attended were these classes, @denzuko?

#3

Holy necrothready, Batman!

#4

I guess I had to go this far back to find a thread on vintage programming classes.

#5

I’m not certain that these classes happened.

1 Like
#6

I do not think they did; he taught Python instead.

2 Likes
#7

@bill is right, NOT ONE attendee. We get better attendance from Python, Go, GoDot Engine, and Infosec classes.

#8

When where they scheduled?

#9

I run BASIC on a Microchip PIC32 32-bit processor using the DuinoMite-Mega board. The processor board costs about $30, the Basic interpreter code is included. See Duinomite. Take the board, add a keyboard, mouse, and video monitor to be up and running.

The version of BASIC is named MMBASIC and the commands closely resemble the original Microsoft BASIC with the additions of LED Display, Network, CAN Bus, Mouse, Video, USB Memory Stick and USB commands. The source code for the interpreter is written in C and is available free. I got my own copy of the source from Here. Adding and/or modifying BASIC commands is easy to support new hardware. Even porting the code to another PIC32 with different I/O was easy. Even comes with documentation.

There is also a Debugger version that runs on a Windows PC, write code, debug, and download into the host.

2 Likes
#10

No sign of them on the calendar. I searched Feb, Mar and Apr 2017. Python classes started in Apr.

#11

The poor attendance from this event, google trends, and further talks with people the demand was established for Python classes over older languages.

Besides, Python is the new BASIC for over a decade now, while Version 2 has been around for almost 20 years; that makes old enough to be a classic language and apart of retro computing.

None of that doesn’t say we don’t have all the manuals and resources avaialble for individuals to play with BASIC at the space.

#12

There are days I wish i had a library of the old code I wrote, even if it was just the educational stuff. 8086 assembly, pascal, LISP, even postscript, as I once wrote a postscript program that you could download to an Apple laser printer, and a half hour later it would print out a very basic fractal.

#13

That event was from 2016 … That said … I think you might be right on BASIC and some of the 8-bit things, however the current Software Dev chair-elect is looking to doing the first one about game design.